On the Goodness of Humanity

Sometimes this world is like a sucker punch to the stomach.  You can’t help but stand there, immobile and gasping for breath at the sheer senselessness of it.

It has been hard lately to be optimistic. An old friend of mine was just involved in a horrible car accident. Five years ago, another close friend was in a coma when she was hit by a drag racer on the freeway. At least twelve people died last night in a mindless shooting in Colorado.  And in the weeks prior to that, the internet was awash with stories of rape, child molestation, and violence against and harassment of women.  The world is bleeding deep, personal pain, and history tells us this is nothing new. It seems that every time I check my email, go online, or read a paper, something horrific has occurred. When I walk outside, the number of suffering, hungry, and homeless in just my own neighborhood is impossible to deny. Even for those of us fortunate to be healthy and have a roof over our heads and food to eat at night, so many carry around deep pain.  The developed world has an entire set of its own problems: eating disorders, cancer, obesity-related illness, office anxiety. So many suffer in silence.  The pain out there is fathomless.  It’s palpable. It’s tangible.

A girl can only do so much, only be pulled so many directions before it feels hopeless.  There are days that I don’t want to get out of bed. I want to pull the covers up over my head and never speak to another human being again.  Yes, this world can knock the wind out of you.

But it can also take your breath away for other, more beautiful reasons.

Photography: "Rustic"

"Rustic" - the inside of a lodge in a South African game reserve.

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/rustic-casey-berger.html

Casey's Law of Hipsterism

Much research and testing went into creating a definition of hipsterism for future scientific debate.

Definitions:

Let j = "tightness of jeans"

Let c = "time since last haircut"

Let u = number of times the subject has dismissively uttered "I liked it before it was cool"

Let i = "irony of eyewear or t-shirts"

Let R'(t) be the frequency of obscure cultural references over time t

Hipsterism (H) as a function of age (t) is defined as the following:

As you can see, the significance of the utterance “I liked it before it was cool” becomes diminished as the subject ages, and irrelevant after 35, as it is more likely to be a factually accurate statement at that time. The choice of clothing has no relationship to age and is consistent regardless of the subject’s age, but the obscure cultural references compound over time.

I present these findings for peer review, and for the edification of my peers and future students of the science of human behavior.

Read more responses to the question "what is a hipster?" at The Inclusive.

Photography: "Last Night of Vacation"

Available for purchase at Fine Art America.

The Best-Laid Plans

It’s amazing the havoc that stress and lack of sleep can wreak on your mind.

I’m what psychologists call a “highly sensitive person.”  No, that does not mean that I’m easily offended.  It does not mean that I fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. It means that my brain processes information differently – in greater detail.  It’s actually a relatively common trait – occurring in about one in five people – and it appears to be biological.

Sometimes, I love this about myself.  But sometimes, it exhausts me.  One of the drawbacks to having a brain that’s more sensitive to incoming information, is that it’s easily overloaded.  I hate crowds.  I hate loud noises.  I used to be absolutely inconsolable during the 4^th of July fireworks.  They still scare me a little, if I’m too close to the source.  Combine the sensitivity with my natural introversion (the traits are not always concurrent, but in my case, they are), and if I’m around people for too long, I just want to scream.  It’s not the people – it’s just my brain.

Enough

What do Daniel Tosh, Anita Sarkeesian, and Jesse Lee Peterson have in common? Practically nothing, except that they have all appeared in news stories this year about women’s issues that have been quite frankly horrifying.

I wrote an article about Reverend Peterson earlier this year when he gave a sermon on why he believes women are destroying America. His sermon was filled with hateful vitriol about women, running the gambit from they can’t handle pressure to they’re all sluts to they aren’t even capable of love. In the article, I explained why we should pay attention to this blatantly bigoted small-time preacher:

We should bother ourselves with people like him because this ugly sentiment is buried deeply in American culture. We see it come out in media figures like Rush Limbaugh, in legislative efforts like the more than nine hundred bills introduced this year alone in state and federal legislature to limit women’s rights, in the thirty-one Republicans who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, and we see it glamorized in media portrayals of women as objects. When almost a third of female homicide victims are killed by their partner and one in five American women have been the victim of rape or attempted rape, we can’t afford to remain silent about this issue.

The events in recent weeks involving Daniel Tosh and Anita Sarkeesian are exactly the sort of thing I was talking about.

Read more at The Inclusive.

Past Our Horizons

Science fiction as a genre has existed almost as long as storytelling itself. Jules Verne wrote of travel to the moon in the eighteen hundreds. The Princess of Mars, upon which Disney’s recent film John Carter of Mars was based, was published in the early part of the twentieth century. Even in Ancient Greece there was sci-fi: Lucian of Samasota wrote of creatures that resided on the sun and the moon in the second century C.E. That’s right – nearly two thousand years ago, someone wrote a book about aliens. Philosophy, science, and literature have always sought to reach beyond our planet, and the general public devours stories that combine this super-terrestrial striving with the very human desire for adventure and exploration.

Last week, NASA released a panoramic photo taken by Opportunity, the sole remaining functioning Mars rover since Spirit fell silent in August 2010. (The new Mars rover, Curiosity, will not land until this August). This beautiful image (which you can click to make massively large) was seen worldwide – the alien landscapes of Mars brought home to Earth. This is the power of space exploration. Children dream of becoming astronauts. Consumers in cafés discuss the possibility of alien life. Dreams of exploring other planets, other galaxies, and even other universes enthrall the public. It is possibly the single greatest way to popularize science as a whole.

Read more at The Inclusive.

The Face of God (Particles)

The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland may have caught a glimpse of the elusive “god particle” – a subatomic particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics. This particle, officially named the Higgs boson, is called the “god particle” because without it, the universe as we know it would simply not exist.

Last week – as America was celebrating Independence Day – European scientists were also celebrating.  CERN announced the discovery of a new particle – a boson that fits the description of the Higgs. They were careful to call the data preliminary, and stated that more analysis was needed, but discovery of a particle that fits the parameters of a predicted particle is exciting at least and world-shaking at most.  If the results are verified, we could essentially have proof for one of the most important theories in modern physics. And I, for one, am confident the results will prove to be the Higgs boson. The scientists said there is approximately a one in two million chance that the data from the collision would not correspond to the Higgs boson. You don’t have to know much about science to know that those odds are pretty good.

Photography: "Summer Blooms"

Getting up-close-and-personal with a beautiful bloom in my mother's garden, Georgia O'Keefe style.  In honor of summer.

Available for purchase on my site.

Nothing Ever Ends: Mass Effect 3's Extended Cut DLC

Note: this article contains spoilers for the entire Mass Effect trilogy

The platform was eerily quiet. The floating shadows of the Reapers darkened the stars that hung around the Citadel while Earth burned below. I contemplated my choices, feeling again the sinking dread in my stomach. None of the three options given to me would be enough. With the entire future of the galaxy riding on my decision, I couldn’t bring myself to pick any of the choices the Catalyst presented me with. None were good enough for the sacrifices made by my friends. My team. Here, at the end of our journey, I was faced not with victory, but with discouragement.